Thoughts of a nomad careerist …

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Yeah, after all the frustration about the bureaucracy in the end everything went well.

I got my visa and I got it pretty quickly, in two days!!! Now, that shows me when they want to make it work, it really can work in a proper way.

Even though I got a bit frustrated at the beginning of the process, now I can look back and say that I’ve learned couple of things by dealing with the additional pressure that came with the process and I want to share my learning experiences so you can be prepared for something similar in your life.

1. Keep your personal documents in order!

Easier said then done. I am always afraid of dealing with personal documents, because I just don’t want to lose them and in order to prevent that every time I invent new system on how to keep the documents in order. The problem is, we don’t need those documents very often, so I tend to forget where did I put them and what was the system all about, but actually this time I kept my old system and I was aware of all my documents from the beginning. So, keep your documents in order and trust in your system even if it fails you the first time. Once, you use your system several times, you will feel much more comfortable with it.

2. Read the questions and instructions carefully!

Every time you deal with bureaucracy you will have to fill questionnaire or to follow some instructions and better be careful every time, because bad decision can come back and bite you. Now a day everything is connected, so if you have wrong information in the system it easily shows up, so by careful on how you answer your questionnaires.

3. Be patient calm!

I used my blog to vent the frustration and then I continued with the process in calm way and in the end it paid off. It will not help you if you get frustrated over one thing and then you make a mistake doing other thing.

In the end, I wish you a lot of luck in dealing with bureaucracy. You might need it.

Imagine the situation where you need to get something done really quickly and to get it done you need to deal with public administration. Sounds fun??

Here’s the thing, I need to get visa for the US and I have to get it until the middle of the December in Stockholm. Piece of cake, one would assume, it takes them only five days to make the visa and it’s still October, even though it feels like it is January (winter in Sweden is really cold). So, I started the procedure in the middle of the October and got bunch of stuff to fill in. Imagine, I need to do drug screening on top of everything. Like I would do that stuff ever 8)). Since I got bunch of questionnaires to fill in, I started with these and I filled one by one, just to find out a week or so later that I could have done these at the end and that I need to do online application first.

So, online application it is. After couple of hours of filling information that even I had hard time remembering (like which countries did I visit in last five years, who cares?) I got to the point where they asked me like 50 questions of this type: “Do you belong to any terrorist organization?” … So, all my answers were “NO”, I am not a terrorist and I don’t use any drugs and I didn’t abuse anyone and I am not a terrorist (again). Anyway, you got the point, I finished the application and wanted to schedule the meeting in the embassy when I found out that the first available time slot is on 10th December (month and a half away) and that’s not the only thing, the embassy is working only 10 days in month of November and they can process 8 persons a day.

What’s there more to say, public administration is synonym for a hard working organization. As you can see, I am bit frustrated with the whole thing, but these kind of things are happening always when the bureaucracy is involved in something.

I mean, do we really need all the administration that we currently have?? Is there a better way of doing things?? Or is it only me who is frustrated with the whole thing??

“If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.”

It remains to be seen if creating this blog was only a temporary whim, or maybe this can grow into something more than that. I sincerely hope that it will indeed grow into something more then a whim and that I will have enough time to write and share my thoughts.

For starters, I really think that blogging is a good way to express thoughts and improve narrative and communication skills. Also, it is good to have archive of thoughts and ideas once discovered in our minds, since we tend to forget the ideas and promises we made to ourselves and to others. So, here and now I am making a promise that I will write down thoughts and ideas that are worth writing down. Hopefully I can stick to my promise.